Lansing Bicentennial Minutes

There were no Carp in Cayuga Lake before 1893. It seems that James Tupper had a farm along a tributary to the lake. He damned the stream and made a pond which he stocked with 25,000 English and German Carp Fries. In 1983 a heavy rain broke the dam sending the swirling waters and carp down the stream, into the inlet and then to the lake. Within 15 years the carp had so multiplied that fishermen caught about 1500 pounds of them every day! They were shipped to the market in NYC where they were made into gefiltefish, a combination of whitefish, pike, and carp. When Ithaca wanted to clean out "The Rhine" and area of squatters at the inlet, the town fathers outlawed the selling of fish from the lake. Today you can "catch 'em, but you can't sell 'em".